Old business in New bottle

When the term “real estate” is mentioned, people immediately get images of bricks, cement, sand, gravel, dusty construction sites and so on. And the business is rightfully termed as “brick-and-mortar” or categorized as “old economy.”

Many youngsters nowadays would prefer to work in swanky offices of a software company or an investment bank instead of sweating it out in dust and heat at construction locations.

But for J.C. Sharma, managing director of Bangalore-based real estate firm Sobha Developers, it makes business sense to combine the selling power of “new economy” Internet and “old economy” real estate.

While speaking to Journalists at Reuters India Investment Summit in Bangalore, Sharma said the Non-Resident Indian (NRI) demand has gone up to 17 percent this year compared to less than 10 percent of demand last year — thanks to the power of Internet.

Maybe, Internet would after all help a homesick Indian toiling in faraway foreign lands to find a home in India. And as J.C. Sharma would have it, one could always find a Sobha home on the cyber highway.